To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Thursday, June 30, 2016

From “Technicians of the Sacred Expanded”: Genesis Three (Enuma Elish), with Commentary

Translation from Old Babylonian by Harris LenowitzWhen sky above
had no name

earth beneath no given name

APSUthe firsttheir seeder

Deepwater

TIAMAT

Saltseatheir motherwho bore them

mixed waters

Before pasture
held together

thicket be found

no gods being

no names for them

no plans

the gods were
shaped inside them

LAHMU AND LAHAMU
were brought out

named

while they grew

becamegreat

ANSAR and KISAR were shaped

SkylineEarthlinemuch
greater

made the days
long

added the years

ANU was their son

Skytheir rival

ANSAR made his first son ANU his equal

SkylineSky

ANUNUDIMMUD

and SkygotManmakerequal

(EA)

NUDIMMUD

Manmaker

(EA)his fathers' boss

wide wise

full knowing

ANSARstrong

stronger than
Skyline his father

no equal among
his brother gods

The
godbrotherstogether

stormed in TIAMAT

Salt sea

stirred up TIAMAT's
guts

Saltsea

rushing at the
walls

APSU

Not Deepwater
hush their noise

TIAMAT

Salt sea struck dumb

They did bad
things to her

acted badly, childishly

APSU

until
Deepwaterseeder of great
gods

called up MUMMU

Speaker:

MUMMU

Speakermessengermakes my liver. happy

come!TIAMAT

Let's go see Saltsea

They wentTIAMAT

sat down in front of Saltsea

(talk about plans for their
first-born gods):

APSU

Deepwateropened his mouthsaid

to TIAMATsaid loud:

Saltsea

"The way
they act makes me sick:

during the
dayno rest

at nightno sleep

I'll destroy
them!

stop their doings!

It'll be quiet
againwe can sleep”

TIAMAT

When Saltsea
heard this

she
stormed

yelled at
her husband

was sick

alone:

"Wipe out what we made?!

The way they act is a pain

but let's wait"

MUMMUAPSU

Speaker answeredadvising Deepwater:MUMMU

bad advice Speaker's

ill-meant

"Go onl

Put an end to their impertinence

then

restduring the day

sleepat night”

When APSUheard him

Deepwaterhis face gleamed

for the
hurts planned

against his godsons

hugged MUMMU

Speaker

set
him in his lap

kissed him

What they planned
in conference was repeated to their first born godsons

(1) The god-world of Enuma Elish starts in turbulence & struggle: a universe the
makers/poets knew or dreamed-into-life & felt the terror/horror at its
heart.It is this rush & crush of
primal elements the poetry here translates into gods & monsters, reflecting
as it does a natural & human world in chaos/turmoil.The scene it leaves for us, replete with
names of gods & powers, follows a story line encountered in many other
times & places.In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, tracing back to still earlier
Sumerian sources, the two primeval forces are the god Apsu
(Deepwater/Freshwater) & the goddess Tiamat (Saltsea), whose offspring will
eventually destroy them both & lead the way for the triumphant reign of the
new god Marduk, killing the goddess off at last & using her severed corpse
to form the earth & sky, with humans coming in their wake.The ferocity of word & image remains a
key to poetic mind both then & now: the dark side of the joy & beauty
that would be needed too to make their world & ours complete.

(2)“The
Babylonian Creation Myth ... relates
how the universe evolved from nothingness to an organized structure with the
city of Babylon
at its center. When the primordial sweet and salt waters – male Apsu and female
Tiamat – mingled, two beings appeared, Lahmu and Lahamu, that is, mud and
muddy. The image suits the southern Babylonian view over the Persian
Gulf perfectly: when the sea recedes, mud arises. A chain reaction
had started [...]” (Mark Van De Mieroop, Philosophy
Before the Greeks: The Pursuit in Ancient Babylonia, 2016, p.4)

And further: “The ancient Babylonians
certainly were not humanists but deeply committed to a theocentric view of the
world.Yet, they believed that humans
could have a firm knowledge of reality as the gods had created it, and
continued to direct it, because at the time of creation the gods had provided
the tools for understanding, as the Enūma
Eliš shows. Creation in that myth was a work of organization: Marduk did
not fashion the universe ex nihilo.
Rather, he created by putting order into the chaos of Tiamat’s bodily parts.
And just as he ordered the physical world, he organized knowledge and
structured it through writing [...] the Babylonian theory of knowledge was
[...] fundamentally rooted in a rationality that depended on an informed
reading. Reality had to be read and interpreted as if it were a text. [...] ‘I
read, therefore I am’ could be seen as the first principle of Babylonian
epistemology.” (Ibid, p.10)

(3) “What’s presented here, the Babylonian
genesis retold, is the paramount interest, & the work of the ones who
present it is an interest almost equal; & all of it crucial to the
unfolding, changing recovery of cultures & civilizations that has now
entered its latest phase.To bring
across this sense of myth as process & conflict, Harris Lenowitz & Charles
Doria, working as both poets & scholars in Origins, make use of all those ‘advances in translation technique,
notation, & sympathy’ developed over the last half century, from the
methods of ‘projective verse’ to those of etymological translation or of that
recovery ofthe oral dimension of the
poem that the present editor & others have, wisely or not, spoken of elsewhere
as ‘total translation.’The picture that
emerges is one of richness, fecundity at every turning, from the first image of
poem on page to the constantly new insights into the possibilities of
‘origin.’And this allows that ‘clash of
symbols’ which, those like Paul Ricoeur tell us, is both natural to mind &
forms its one sure hedge against idolatry.”(Adapted from J.R. in the pre-face to Origins, 1975)

(4) “We live in an age in which inherited
literature is being hit from two sides, from contemporary writers who are
laying bases of new discourse at the same time that ... scholars ... are making
available pre-Homeric and pre-Mosaic texts which are themselves eye-openers.”
(Charles Olson, “Homer & Bible,” 1957)

N.B.In the translation, above, god names are
underlined throughout, with the English translation directly beneath.

No comments:

A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]